The Trinity Session by Cowboy Junkies

The Trinity Session, Cowboy Junkies' second album, first came out in early 1988 on Latent Recordings in Canada before RCA took it worldwide later that year, and how it was made is half the magic. The band set up inside Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity on November 27, 1987, and recorded it gathered around a single microphone.

You can hear the room in every note: the songs drift and hover, slow as smoke, and the vocals float up toward the rafters, hushed as a confession. The set mixes the band's own songs with covers of old folk, rock and country tunes, and the showstopper is "Sweet Jane", their best-known single, a Velvet Underground song they modeled on the version from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live rather than the studio take on Loaded, and slowed to a dreamy crawl. "Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" is a cover and an original at once, a new song of theirs wrapped around the pop standard "Blue Moon", and "Misguided Angel" aches just as quietly.

In 2007 they played the album in full as part of All Tomorrow's Parties' Don't Look Back series, and that same year they went back to the church with Natalie Merchant, Vic Chesnutt and Ryan Adams to cut it all over again, released as Trinity Revisited for the 20th anniversary.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.